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Another example of why you should never buy DRM content

Digital Rights Management is such a crock. In today’s example of why you should never, ever ‘license’ DRM’d content, check out what’s happened to the customers of Microsoft’s MSN Music business. Microsoft is turning off the lights on the service and ceasing support for the infrastructure which provides the ‘keys’ which allow you to move your content from machine to machine. You can burn CD’s to rescue the content off the hardware (while reducing the quality), so you won’t permanently lose access to it so long as you take that step and accept the quality trade off, but you should never have had to do that in the first place. As I’ve warned before, stay away from services licensing DRM’d content. Emusic, Amazon, and others now offer unencumbered mp3 files at higher bit rates than Apple and the other DRM-encumbered music merchants. iTunes may be convenient but it’s supporting an untenable business model. To those who would say say Apple would never pull a similar move, companies don’t get much larger than Microsoft, and they just did it. Vote with your wallet folks.

This is the total suck. I actually had trouble with this initially when they released Bioshock, a great game I played through last year. I actually couldn’t play it at first without problems, and the publisher eventually relented and released a patch, after which I could play. The whole thing pissed me off. I will not be buying either of these games as a result of this decision on their part, which for spore is especially a huge bummer. I’ve already played through most of the other game on xbox. Consoles don’t have nearly this kind of trouble these days and are in many ways the better games platform at this point.